Dmitry Shostakovich must be reckoned among the
leading composers of the twentieth century. Heralded by
Soviet authorities following the Bolshevik revolution,
his fortunes rose and fell in response to the thoughts and
actions of Joseph Stalin. During the 1920s he had been
hailed as the most promising of the new generation of
Russian — that is “Soviet” — composers, one who had,
in fact, captured the enthusiastic attention of Stalin
himself. The Soviet dictator especially liked the series
of politically correct film scores Shostakovich was
composing in the populist style known throughout the
arts as Soviet Realism.

Beginning with his opera, The Nose (from Gogol),
in 1927-28, powerful Stalinists started faulting the
composer for forsaking the principles of the Revolution.
Still, Shostakovich remained in good stead until his
audacious opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
was skewered by Stalin after an initially successful
première in 1934. A year later Pravda published an
editorial, titled “Chaos Instead of Music”, echoing
Stalin’s judgement. Though he regained favour with his
ostensibly populist Symphony No. 5, still his most
played symphony, he faced renewed censure beginning
in 1948, when the Cold War began to intensify and
deviations from the party line were punishable offences.
Creating music under totalitarian rule is fraught with
perilous consequences, and Shostakovich strove
mightily to fashion music that would enable him to
survive in a landscape of political quicksand.

For the rest of his life Shostakovich faced
uncertainty and suppression from Soviet authorities. A
controversial book by Solomon Volkov, purporting
accurately to reproduce interviews with Shostakovich,
posits the argument that beneath Shostakovich’s pro-
Soviet “manifest” musical themes is a dark strain of
covert anti-Stalinist messages. Though most scholarly
writers now discount Volkov’s veracity, opinion in the
West about Shostakovich has in any case changed
radically since the 1960s, when many commentators
tended to view the composer as a lackey of the Soviet
system. No one denies the fear of reprisal that
Shostakovich and other Soviet creative artists lived with
during the long Stalinist era. Today Shostakovich is
rightly regarded as one of the dominant symphonists of
modern times. Specific hidden messages or not, his
music is inventive, dramatic, and spiky, frequently
balancing public declamation with intensively brooding
introspection.

Moody both by nature and in reaction to the anxious
environment of Stalinist repression, Shostakovich had
an unerring and Mahler-like propensity toward dark
utterance and musical parody. Yet he also had a capacity
for joyful expression that served as a balance to his
depressive tendencies. In common with works by his
older colleague, Sergey Prokofiev, Shostakovich’s
music reveals a palpable undercurrent of irony. His
Piano Concerto No. 1, dating from 1933, is filled with
sardonic humour and parody, leavened by a truly
beautiful slow movement. Twenty years later, following
the death of Stalin, Shostakovich wrote his dark, angstridden
Symphony No. 10, judged by many
commentators as his finest symphonic work. Its
ferocious Scherzo has been described as a portrait of
Stalin’s murderous personality.

The Execution of Stepan Razin, Shostakovich’s
symphonic poem for baritone, mixed chorus and
orchestra, is an intentionally ambiguous work that
operates on two levels. Its manifest content, to use
Freud’s term, relates to the seventeenth-century Cossack
rebel who led an unsuccessful revolt against Tsar Alexis
I, father of Peter the Great. Captured, tortured and
eventually beheaded in 1671, Razin became a
posthumous folk-hero, a symbol of the downtrodden
and disenfranchised individual standing up to
entrenched, brutal power. As a son of the Revolution,
Shostakovich composed this cantata-like work to
celebrate the life of Razin and by extension, all ordinary
people who fought the great ongoing battle against
repression. At the same time, the latent content (to
continue with Freud’s phraseology) points tellingly
toward Soviet repression personified by Stalin and his
minions.

Though Stalin had been dead for more than a
decade when Shostakovich composed this work in
1964, Stepan Razin made party loyalists squirm since it
could be taken as both a celebration of revolutionary
fervour and a condemnation, not of Soviet Realism, but
of Soviet reality. Adding to the apparatchiks’
discomfort, the text for Stepan Razin came courtesy of
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who had already denounced
Russian anti-Semitism in Babi Yar, which Shostakovich
had used in his Symphony No. 13.

The baritone soloist in Stepan Razin serves as both
narrator and the eponymous Cossack leader. A virtual
Greek chorus, the supporting singers echo and comment
on the swirling events. Shostakovich’s energetic score
shows a mastery of orchestral colour achieved over a
lifetime of symphonic writing, ranging from aptly
abrasive sonorities to heartfelt evocations of Russian
folk-song. Much the same can be said of his treatment
of the choruses, which resonate to the magnificent
crowd scenes in Mussorgsky’s epic opera, Boris
Godunov.

One of Shostakovich’s last orchestral works,
composed fourteen years after Stalin’s death in March
1953, was the tone poem October, Op. 131, which
received its première in October 1967. It was not the
first time the composer had commemorated the October
Revolution: both the Second and Twelfth Symphonies
bore musical witness to that signal event in
Russian/Soviet history. The 1967 score,
commemorating the Golden Anniversary of that iconic
event, is a short tone poem that, as with several other of
Shostakovich’s works, quotes from previous works, in
this case Partisan Song from his score for a mid-1930s
film, Volochayev Days, with another from the Tenth
Symphony. An opening section, Moderato, serves as an
introduction to an Allegro that builds to a fever-pitched
march.

Shostakovich composed his rarely heard Five
Fragments (1935) as experimental “practice runs” for
his Fourth Symphony. They are brief aphoristic
utterances in a spare style redolent of Schoenberg, Berg
and Webern. The first two Fragments are rhythmically
quirky and tersely “modernistic.” No. 3 is slow and
pensive, with long-held notes high in the violins. Short
though it is (though it is the longest movement at a little
under four minutes), it is strangely affecting, both sad
and tender. No. 4 begins with bassoon soon joined in
counterpoint by clarinet, then oboe, followed by the
arrival of strings in the final minute. The edgy fifth
number opens with snare drum and violin, recalling the
life/death battle between the devil and the hapless
soldier in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat.